Khari’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update
Khari
is on page 130 of 223
"[Democracy] is a name they venerate...of course it is connected with the political idea that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal...You can get him to practice, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided."
— 2 hours, 19 min ago
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Khari’s Previous Updates
Khari
is on page 137 of 223
"Now this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to the humans for thousands of years. ..The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it-make it respectable and even laudable-by the incantatory use of the word democratic."
— 2 hours, 14 min ago
Khari
is on page 137 of 223
"And therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food."
— 2 hours, 16 min ago
Khari
is on page 137 of 223
"The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing, awareness of an inferiority which they refuse to accept."
— 2 hours, 17 min ago
Khari
is on page 130 of 223
"{they must never} be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether democratic behavior means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same."
— 2 hours, 21 min ago
Khari
is on page 130 of 223
"Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be one of unbroken success."
I think that's the scariest thought I've gotten from this book to this point. The expectation of unbroken success is from hell, not heaven.
— Jan 30, 2026 02:42AM
I think that's the scariest thought I've gotten from this book to this point. The expectation of unbroken success is from hell, not heaven.
Khari
is on page 117 of 223
"Despair...would show that he had believed in, and accepted, the Enemy's forgiveness of his other sins only because he himself did not fully feel their sinfulness-that in respect of the one vice which he really understands in its full depth of dishonor he cannot seek, nor credit the Mercy...Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it."
— Jan 27, 2026 02:29AM
Khari
is on page 117 of 223
"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky."
— Jan 27, 2026 02:27AM
Khari
is on page 115 of 223
"In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but NOT sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness."
Oof. This one is rampant in our society.
— Jan 27, 2026 02:24AM
Oof. This one is rampant in our society.
Khari
is on page 113 of 223
"The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth....We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a 'normal life' is the exception. Apparently He wants some-but only a very few-of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years."
— Jan 26, 2026 06:15AM
Khari
is on page 113 of 223
"So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or 'science' or psychology, or what not."
— Jan 26, 2026 06:13AM
